Climate change is having a devastating impact on the Himalaya. On the Ngozumpa glacier, one of the largest and longest in the region, hundreds of supraglacial lakes dot the glacier surface. One lake in particular is known for its continuous volume purges on an annual basis. Near the start of the monsoon this summer, in less than 48 hours, it loses enough water to fill over 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools. To make matters worse, these glacial lakes act like cancers: they consume Himalayan glaciers from the inside out, making some of them melt twice as fast. As a result, villages down-valley from these glacial lakes are becoming increasingly prone to violent flash floods, which locals call Himalayan Tsunamis.

To provide early warnings of these flash floods requires that we collect a lot more geophysical and hydrologic information on these glacial lakes. So scientists like Ulyana (co-author) are racing to understand exactly how these glacial lakes form and grow, and how they’re connected to each other through seemingly secret subterranean channels. We need to know how deep and steep these lakes are, what the lake floors look like and of what materials they are composed (e.g., mud, rock, bare ice).

Ulyana, her colleagues and a small local team of Sherpa have recently started using autonomous swimming robots to automatically map lake floors and look for cracks that may trigger mountain tsunamis. Using robotics to do this is both faster and more accurate than having humans take the measurements. What’s more, robots are significantly safer. Indeed, even getting near these lakes (let alone in them!) is dangerous enough due to unpredictable collapses of ice called calving and large boulders rolling off of surrounding ice cliffs and into the lakes below. Just imagine being on a small inflatable boat floating on ice-cold water when one of those icefalls happen.

We (Ulyana and Patrick) are actively looking to utilize diving robots as well—specifically the one in the video footage below. This OpenROV Trident robot will enable us to get to the bottom of these glacial lakes to identify deepening ‘hotspots’ before they’re visible from the lake’s surface or from the air. Our plan next year is to pool our efforts, bringing diving, swimming and flying robots to Nepal so we can train our partners—Sherpas and local engineers—on how to use these robotic solutions to essentially take the ‘pulse’ of the changing Himalaya. This way they’ll be able to educate as well as warn nearby villages before the next mountain floods hit.

We plan to integrate these efforts with WeRobotics (co-founded by co-author Patrick) and in particular with the local robotics lab that WeRobotics is already setting up in Kathmandu. This lab has a number of flying robots and trained Nepali engineers. To learn more about how these flying robots are being used in Nepal, check out the pictures here.

We’ll soon be adding diving robots to the robotic lab’s portfolio in Nepal thanks to WeRobotics’s partnership with OpenROV. What’s more, all WeRobotics labs have an expressed goal of spinning off local businesses that offer robotics as services. Thus, the robotics start-up that spins off from our lab in Nepal will offer a range of mapping services using both flying and diving robots. As such, we want to create local jobs that use robotics (jobs that local partners want!) so that our Nepali friends can make a career out of saving their beautiful mountains.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/08/marine-robotics-himalayan-tsunamis/feed/0182662Aerial Robotics in the Land of the Buddhahttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/04/aerial-robotics-land-of-buddha/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/04/aerial-robotics-land-of-buddha/#respondWed, 04 Nov 2015 15:07:14 +0000http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/?p=168913

Buddhist Temples adorn Nepal’s blessed land. Their stupas, like Everest, stretch to the heavens, yearning to democratize the sky. I felt the same yearning after arriving in Kathmandu with our UAVs. While some prefer the word “drone” over “UAVs”, the reason our Nepali partners don’t like the word drone dates back some 3,000 years to the spiritual epic Mahabharata (Great Story of Bharatas). The ancient story features Drona, a master of advanced military arts who slayed hundreds of thousands with his bow & arrows. This strong military connotation explains why our Nepalis use “UAV” instead, which is the term we also used for our Humanitarian UAV Mission in the land of Buddha. Our purpose: to democratize the sky.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are aerial robots. They are the first wave of robotics to impact the humanitarian space. The mission of the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) is to enable the safe, responsible and effective use of UAVs in a wide range of humanitarian and development settings. We want to empower local partners with robotics. As Founder of UAViators, I had the honor of spearheading a unique and weeklong UAV Mission in Nepal last month in close collaboration with Kathmandu University (KU), Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL), Community Disaster Management Committee (CDMC) #9 Ward, Kirtipur, DJI andPix4D. This mission represents the first major milestone for Kathmandu Flying Labs.

Debris left over from the tragic earthquakes in April & Map 2015. Credit: Patrick Meier

Our friends at CDMC-9 invited us to survey their town of Panga, which had been severely affected by the earthquake just months earlier. They were particularly keen to gain access to better data. Very high-resolution aerial imagery of the area would give them much better data to inform their rebuilding efforts. So we spent a full day flying half-a-dozen Phantom 3’s over parts of Panga as requested by our local partners.

We thought we had completed our mission after a full day of flying. But our Nepali partners politely noted that we had not in fact finished the job; we still had a lot more area to cover. They wanted us back in Panga the following day to complete the aerial surveys. This threw a bit of wrench in our plans; we were on a tight schedule and I had a return flight to catch. But this was the best possible wrench. This wrench meant that we were at the right place at the right time; that we were making a difference. So I canceled my flight and stayed out. We returned to Panga the next day and flew dozens of additional UAV flights from sunup to sunset. Our local partners were absolutely invaluable throughout since they were the ones informing the flight plans. They also made it possible for us to launch and land all our flights from the highest rooftops across town. With more than 800 aerial photographs in hand, the Pix4D team worked through the night to produce a very high-resolution orthorectified mosaic of Panga. The results including the 3D models and more are available here.

Our local partners work with us to program the UAV flights. Credit Patrick Meier.

While this technically meant that we had successfully completed our mission, it didn’t feel finished to me. I really wanted to unlock and “liberate” the data completely and place it directly into the hands of the CDCM and the local community in Panga. What’s the point of “open data” if most of Panga’s residents do not have easy access to computers and are thus unable to view or interact with the resulting maps? So I asked our local partners if we could print out our maps on large, rollable and warterpoof banners (which are more durable than paper-based maps).

Our CDMC friend unrolls our banner map to share the results of all the flying with the local community. Credit: Patrick MeierLocal community members discuss the map, which is the highest resolution map ever produced of their town. Credit: Patrick MeierOur CDMC friends explain the purpose of the map and invite the local community to add relevant information to the map. Credit: Patrick Meier

We gave these banner-maps back to the local community and invited them to hack the maps. How? Directly, by physically adding their local knowledge to the map; knowledge about the location of debris, temporary shelters, drinking water and lots more. We brought tape and color-coded paper with us to code this knowledge so that the community could annotate the map themselves.

We crowdsource local knowledge by inviting community members to mark where these features appear on the map. Credit: Meier

The result was a social intelligence layer that provided rich contextual information to further inform the rebuilding process. This crowdsourced crisis map of Panga also enabled everyone to participate. And so, for the first time ever, the community of Panga was working off the one and same dataset to discuss their recovery strategies. In sum, our humanitarian mission combined aerial robotics, computer vision, waterproof banners, tape, paper and crowdsourcing to inform the rebuilding process at the community level.

Using colored pieces of paper, scissors and tape, members of the local community got to work. Credit: Patrick Meier

This approach to community mapping is more democratic, enabling greater participation from the local community. Credit: Patrick Meier

Our CDMC friends discuss priority areas for the rebuilding and restruction with the local community. Credit: Patrick Meier

Within minutes, community members had added a detailed social intelligence layer to the base map. Credit: Patrick Meier

Participants of all ages joined the mapping and conversations. Credit: Patrick Meier

The map was later attached to the side of an abandoned building. Community conversations continued. Credit: Patrick Meier.

When we left Panga, community members were still discussing the map and the 50+ markers they had added. Credit: Patrick Meier

The engagement from the community was phenomenal and definitely the highlight of the mission. Our CDMC partners were equally thrilled and excited with the community engagement that the maps elicited. There were smiles all around. When we left Panga some four hours later, dozens of community members were still discussing the map, which our partners had hung up near a popular local teashop.

Thanks to our partnership with DJI and Pix4D, our partners at Kathmandu University (KU) and Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL) also received 10 free UAVs (Phantom 3’s) from DJI and free access to the Pix4D software. In sum, the purpose of UAViators and our Flying Labs is not only to transfer skills and knowledge, or to simply generate much needed aerial data for local partners. We also endeavor to empower our local partners with the technologies they need to democratize the sky and carry out their own Humanitarian UAV Missions.

We’re now busy planning a follow up mission to Nepal for early next year. We’ll be returning to Kathmandu Flying Labs (KFL) with new technology partners to train students at KU and colleagues at KLL on how to use fixed-wing UAVs for large scale mapping efforts. In the meantime, we’re exploring the possibility of launching Jakarta Flying Labs, Monrovia Flying Labs and Santiago Flying Labs in 2016. And we need your help. I’m quitting my day job next week to devote myself full time to these efforts. So please help our Nepali friends ensure that Kathmandu Flying Labs takes-off and becomes a thriving and sustainable social entrepreneurship lab. We’re actively looking for partners and sponsors to make all this happen, so please do get in touch if you share our vision and want to join us on future missions. And if you can’t be with us in person, you can always join our missions live via our Twitter feed. In the meantime, big, big thanks to our Nepali and technology partners for making our good work together possible.

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on humanitarian technology and innovation. Patrick is also the Founder of the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) and the author of the new book “Digital Humanitarians” which has been endorsed by the UN, World Bank, Red Cross, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, LinkedIn, Twitter and National Geographic.Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier. In November, Patrick will be leaving his position as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) to pursue his passion in “Aid Robotics”.

UAVs are increasingly used in humanitarian response. We have thus added a new Clicker to our MicroMappers collection. The purpose of the “Aerial Clicker” is to crowdsource the tagging of aerial imagery captured by UAVs in humanitarian settings. Trying out new technologies during major disasters can pose several challenges, however, so we’re teaming up with Drone Adventures, Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, Polytechnic of Namibia, and l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to try out our new Clicker using high-resolution aerial photographs of wild animals in Namibia.

As part of their wildlife protection efforts, rangers at Kuzikus want to know how many animals (and what kinds) are roaming about their wildlife reserve. So Kuzikus partnered with Drone Adventures and EPFL’s Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) and the Laboratory of Geographic Information Systems (LASIG) to launch the SAVMAP project, which stands for “near real-time ultrahigh-resolution imaging from unmanned aerial vehicles for sustainable land management and biodiversity conservation in semi-arid savanna under regional and global change.” SAVMAP was co-funded by CODEV through LASIG. You can learn more about their UAV flights here.

Our partners are interested in experimenting with crowdsourcing to make sense of this aerial imagery and raise awareness about wildlife in Namibia. As colleagues at Kuzikus recently told us, rhino poaching continues to be a growing problem that threatens to extinguish some rhino species within a decade or two. Rhino monitoring is thus important for their protection. One problem is detecting rhinos in large areas and/or dense bush areas. Using digital maps in combination with MicroMappers to trace aerial images of rhinos could greatly improve rhino-monitoring efforts.

So our pilot project serves two goals: 1) Trying out the new Aerial Clicker for future humanitarian deployments; 2) Assessing whether crowdsourcing can be used to correctly identify wild animals.

Can you spot the zebras in the aerial imagery above? If so, you’re already a digital ranger! No worries, you won’t need to know that those are actually zebras, you’ll simply outline any animals you find (using your mouse) and click on “Add my drawings.” Yes, it’s that easy!

We’ll be running our Wildlife Challenge from September 26th–28th. To sign up for this digital expedition to Namibia, simply join the MicroMappers list-serve here. We’ll be sure to share the results of the Challenge with all volunteers who participate and with our partners in Namibia. We’ll also be creating a wildlife map based on the results so our friends know where the animals have been spotted (by you!).

Given that rhino poaching continues to be a growing problem in Namibia (and elsewhere), we will obviously not include the location of rhinos in our wildlife map. You’ll still be able to look for and trace rhinos (like those above) as well as other animals like ostriches, oryxes & giraffes, for example. Hint: shadows often reveal the presence of wild animals!

Drone Adventures hopes to carry out a second mission in Namibia early next year. So, if we’re successful in finding all the animals this time around, then we’ll have the opportunity to support the Kuzikus Reserve again in their future protection efforts. Either way, we’ll be better prepared for the next humanitarian disaster thanks to this pilot program. MicroMappers is developed by QCRI and is a joint project with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Any questions or suggestions? Feel free to email me at patrick@iRevolution.net or add them in the comments section below. Thank you!

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/15/using-uavs-to-crowdsource-the-search-for-namibias-wildlife/feed/8144435Using UAVs to Map an Ancient Wonder of the Worldhttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/08/using-uavs-to-map-an-ancient-wonder-of-the-world/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/08/using-uavs-to-map-an-ancient-wonder-of-the-world/#respondMon, 08 Sep 2014 21:21:50 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=143966Patrick Meier is using UAVs, popularly called “drones”, to map out archaeological sites and aid humanitarian and environmental efforts. He partners with institutions around the globe to bring us amazing, interactive community projects and, of course, stunning aerial photos.

It isn’t every day that we get to fly drones over one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Thanks to our intrepid partners and hosts, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (NYU) and the Austrian Archaeological Institute, we’ve just returned from an amazing week in southern Turkey where we flew over ancient theaters and temples dating as far back as the 10th century B.C. We’ll be publishing a longer, more detailed blog post on our Drone Adventures once we’ve had the chance to analyze all the imagery. In the meantime, we’re excited to share a quick overview of the project.

In the background, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—the Temple of Artemis. (Photo by Patrick Meier)

While we made up the term “airchaeology”, we define it as the study of human activity in the past, conducted from the air in the present. Our airchaeology expedition in southern Turkey included dozens of flights over the ancient cities of Aphrodisias and Ephesus. Here’s one of the resulting high-resolution aerial maps we produced for Aphrodisias:

This was the first time that archaeologists at these excavation sites used UAVs to support their research. Why do they need high-resolution aerial imagery and 3D models? An archaeologist and an architect working in Aphrodisias discuss the need for “airchaeology” in this short video:

Have a look at the photo gallery below to get a sense of the terrain and structures we surveyed with Ben, Andrew, and the team. While you may not be able to tell from these pictures, it was hot—very hot! Which is another reason why Ben and Andrew would rather have the UAVs take on the Turkish sun than do it themselves.

Stay tuned for our follow-up post which will include detailed 3D models, high-resolution images and more videos of our “airchaeology” expedition in southern Turkey. For now, we leave you with the two aerial images below as teasers along with these tweets/pics from the field.

A high-resolution aerial images of the theater in the ancient “City of Aphrodite” (Aphrodisias). (Photo by Patrick Meier)This second image, captured in infrared, enables archaeologists to find patterns vis-a-vis the vegetation, which may reveal underlying structures.(Photo by Patrick Meier)

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/08/using-uavs-to-map-an-ancient-wonder-of-the-world/feed/0143966Social Media: Pulse of the Planet?http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/05/social-media-pulse-of-the-planet/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/05/social-media-pulse-of-the-planet/#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 17:52:54 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=80032In 2010, Hillary Clinton described social media as a new nervous system for our planet (1). So can the pulse of the planet be captured by looking at social media activity?

There are many who are skeptical not least because of the digital divide: “You mean the pulse of the Data Have’s? The pulse of the affluent?” These rhetorical questions are perfectly justified, which is why social media alone should not be the sole source of information that feeds into decision-making for policy purposes. But millions are joining the social media ecosystem everyday, so the selection bias is not increasing but decreasing. We may not be able to capture the pulse of the planet comprehensively at a very high resolution yet, but the pulse of the majority of the world is certainly growing louder by the day.

Planet Earth by night. Credit: NASA.

This map of the world at night (based on 2011 data) reveals areas powered by electricity. Yes, Africa has far less electricity consumption. This is not misleading, it has been shown to be an accurate proxy for industrial development (amongst other indexes). Does this data suffer from selection bias? Yes, the data is biased towards larger cities rather than the long tail. Does this render the data and map useless? Hardly. It all depends on what the question is.

Live map of Tweets. Credit: Franck Ernewein.

What if our world were lit up by information instead of lightbulbs? The map above from TweetPing does just that. The website displays tweets in real-time as they’re posted across the world. Strictly speaking, the platform displays 10% of the ~340 million tweets posted each day (i.e., the “Decahose” rather than the “Firehose”). But the volume and velocity of the pulsing ten percent is already striking.

Geo-tagged Tweets and Flickr pictures. Credit: Eric Fischer.

One may think this picture depicts electricity use in Europe. Instead, this is a map of geo-located tweets (blue dots) and Flickr pictures (red dots). “White dots are locations that have been posted to both” (2). The number of active Twitter users grew 40% in 2012, making Twitter the fastest growing social network on the planet. Over 20% of the world’s internet population is now on Twitter (3). The Sightsmap below is a heat map based on the number of photographs submitted to Panoramio at different locations.

The map below depicts friendship ties on Facebook. This was generated using data when there were “only” 500 million users compared to today’s 1 billion+.

Friendship links on Facebook. Credit: Facebook.

The map below does not depict electricity use in the US or the distribution of the population based on the most recent census data. Instead, this is a map of check-in’s on Foursquare. What makes this map so powerful is not only that it was generated using 500 million check-in’s but that “all those check-ins you see aren’t just single points—they’re links between all the other places people have been.”

Location of Foursquare check-in’s. Credit: Foursquare.

TwitterBeat takes the (emotional) pulse of the planet by visualizing the Twitter Decahose in real-time using sentiment analysis. The crisis map in the YouTube video below comprises all tweets about Hurricane Sandy over time. “[Y]ou can see how the whole country lights up and how tweets don’t just move linearly up the coast as the storm progresses, capturing the advance impact of such a large storm and its peripheral effects across the country” (4).

These social media maps don’t only “work” at the country level or for Western industrialized states. Take the following map of Jakarta made almost exclusively from geo-tagged tweets. You can see the individual roads and arteries (nervous system). Granted, this map works so well because of the horrendous traffic but nevertheless a pattern emerges, one that is strongly correlated to Jakarta’s road network. And unlike the map of the world at night, we can capture this pulse in real time and at a fraction of the cost.

Geo-tagged Tweets in Jakarta. Credit: Eric Fischer.

Like any young nervous system, our social media system is still growing and evolving. But it is already adding value. The analysis of tweets predicts the flu better than the crunching of traditional data used by public health institutions, for example. And the analysis of tweets from Indonesia also revealed that Twitter data can be used to monitor food security in real-time.

The main problem I see about all this has much less to do with issues of selection bias and unrepresentative samples, etc. More problematic is the centralized nature of this overall data and the fact that it is closed data. Yes, the above maps are public, but the underlying data is not. In their new study, “The Politics of Twitter Data,” Cornelius Puschmann and Jean Burgess argue that the “owners” of social media data are the platform providers, not the end users. Yes, access to Twitter.com and Twitter’s API is free but end users are limited to downloading just a few thousand tweets per day. (For comparative purposes, more than 20 million tweets were posted during Hurricane Sandy). Getting access to more data can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In other words, as Puschmann and Burgess note, “only corporate actors and regulators—who possess both the intellectual and financial resources to succeed in this race—can afford to participate,” which means “that the emerging data market will be shaped according to their interests.”

“Social Media: Pulse of the Planet?” It’s getting there, but only a few elite doctors can take the full pulse in real-time.

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for positive social change. He currently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier.

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http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/05/social-media-pulse-of-the-planet/feed/580032Digital Disaster Response to Typhoon Pablohttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/19/digital-disaster-response/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/19/digital-disaster-response/#respondWed, 19 Dec 2012 15:55:54 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=73797The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) on December 5th at 3pm Geneva time (9am New York). The activation request? To collect all relevant tweets about Typhoon Pablo posted on December 4th and 5th; identify pictures and videos of damage/flooding shared in those tweets; geo-locate, time-stamp and categorize this content. The UN requested that this database be shared with them by 5am Geneva time the following day.
Damage caused by Typhoon Pablo. Credit: CBCPNews.com.

The DHN is composed of several members who form Solution Teams when the network is activated. The purpose of Digital Humanitarians is to support humanitarian organizations in their disaster response efforts around the world. Solution Team volunteers analyzed over 20,000 tweets in just 10 hours using a variety of methods ranging from automated algorithms to micro-tasking. They used Geofeedia to identify all relevant pictures/videos that were already geo-tagged by users. About a dozen were identified in this manner. They also partnered with the Qatar Foundation Computing Research Institute’s (QCRI) Crisis Computing Team to collect all tweets posted on December 5th with the hashtags endorsed by the Philippine Government. QCRI ran algorithms on the dataset to remove (1) all retweets and (2) all tweets without links (URLs).

Geofeedia used in response to Typhoon Pablo. Credit: Geofeedia.com.

On the micro-tasking side, digital volunteers used PyBossa, a free and open-source micro-tasking platform. Micro-tasking envolves taking a big task and turning it into a series of smaller, more manageable tasks. Colleagues at PyBossa rapidly customized a platform to support the Digital Humanitarian Network. Volunteers would simply go to the PyBossa website for Typhoon Pablo where they’d be shown one tweet at time as the screenshot below demonstrates.

The micro-tasking platform PyBossa in use for the response to Typhoon Pablo. Credit: PyBossa.

The result? Within 10 hours, over 20,000 tweets were analyzed using a combination of methodologies. By 4.30am Geneva time, the efforts of the Digital Humanitarian Network resulted in a database of 138 highly annotated tweets. Just hours later, UN OCHA published the map below which is entirely sourced from the social media analysis produced by the Digital Humanitarian Network. This is the first ever map of this kind and an important milestone in digital humanitarian response. (Simply click on the map to enlarge).

Official UN social media crisis map of Typhoon Pablo. Credit: OCHA.

Just a few days ago, the Digital Humanitarian Network was once again activated; this time in response to Cyclone Evan in Samoa. If you want to become a digital humanitarian, please visit the DHN website to learn more about the individual teams and contact those you are most interested in.

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for positive social change. He currently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/19/digital-disaster-response/feed/073797How the Search for Genghis Khan Helped the United Nations Map Refugees in Somaliahttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/23/refugees-in-somalia/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/23/refugees-in-somalia/#commentsMon, 23 Jul 2012 21:31:11 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=54113National Geographic has been exploring new worlds for well over a hundred years. In the present century, these new worlds include digital worlds—the next frontier of exploration. Take National Geographic’s recent digital expedition in Mongolia. The “Valley of the Khans Project” represents a new approach to archeology that gives us each the opportunity to be a digital Indiana Jones by searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan using the World Wide Web. The very same technologies can also turn us into digital humanitarians in support of the United Nations (UN). Here’s a story about how National Geographic’s digital expedition in Mongolia inspired the UN during their humanitarian response operations in Somalia.
National Geographic digital exploration of Mongolia. Credit: National Geographic.

More than 6 million square kilometers of satellite imagery is produced every single day. The total surface area of the moon is about 35 million square kilometers. So every 6 days, there is a new moon’s worth of exploration to be done in the digital world of satellite imagery. Question is, how can we possibly explore an entire new moon every week? Do we need to build the digital equivalent of the Millenium Falcon? Do we even have a pilot good enough for this mission? The software to automatically and accurately analyze this vast amount of satellite imagery is still not good enough. So what to do? Turns out National Geographic had the answer all along: crowdsource the expedition.

In their phenomenal project, Valley of the Kahns, National Geographic crowdsourced the analysis of high resolution satellite imagery in the search for clues to an 800 year old mystery, the location of Genghis Khan’s tomb. Welcome to my world, the world of intrepid digital exploration. The answer to the 3 million kilometer question wasn’t one pilot and one Millennium Falcon. No! The answer was hundreds of thousands of pilots from all around the world flying their own X-wings over the vast virtual landscape of Mongolia in search of Genghis Khan.

I blogged about this awesome project when it was launched and described how we could take this same approach in humanitarian crises. A few months later, the crisis in the Horn of Africa began to escalate, displacing a massive number of peoples West of Mogadishu. So the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) asked me if we could use the same approach as National Geographic’s to estimate the displaced refugee population in Somalia. Why? Because due to Al Shabbab’s terrorist activities, humanitarians could not do this kind of survey on the ground, they too were being targeted and kidnapped. So we needed to take it to the skies and the UN was in dire need of pilots.

Tomnod was customized to support the United Nations in Somalia. Credit: Tomnod.

So we used the same technology that was used for the Mongolia expedition. Called Tomnod, the platform is designed to crowdsource and crowdtag satellite imagery. We obtained free imagery from DigitalGlobe, which was then “sliced up” into thousands of smaller pictures. Each of these, like the one below was then analyzed by digital explorers looking for signs of permanent and temporary shelters.

The satellite imagery was sliced up into small pictures. Credit: Tomnod.com.

Whey found such shelters, they would simply tag the feature with the appropriate icon, just like in the Valley of the Khans. Only when a shelter was tagged by at least three individual volunteers would that data point be shared with the United Nations. This was a great way to ensure some quality control in the process.

The result? Within 120 hours, volunteers created over a quarter million tags after analyzing close to 4,000 individual images, thus yielding a triangulated count of some 47,000 shelters in the Afgooye corridor of Somalia, which the UN could use to estimate the population in the area. To provide context, it took two UNHCR staff over an entire month to do this back in 2010. We did the equivalent in 120 hours.

Tomnod uses a consensus based algorithm to triangulate the tagging. Credit: Tomnod.

But who do I mean when I say “we did this”? I mean the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a global network of some 800+ volunteers in 80+ countries who support humanitarian and human rights organizations in times of need. They were the pilots who flew the Somalia Mission for the United Nations after being inspired by National Geographic’s search for Genghis Khan in Mongolia.

Digital expeditions like these can democratize the next frontier of exploration. So I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues at National Geographic to support future explorations into the digital unknown. Onwards!

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for positive social change. He currently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/23/refugees-in-somalia/feed/354113How Crisis Mapping Saved Lives in Haitihttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/02/crisis-mapping-haiti/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/02/crisis-mapping-haiti/#commentsMon, 02 Jul 2012 13:46:25 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=51651To map the world, is to know it. To map the world live is to change it before it’s too late.

The National Geographic Society has a long history of crisis mapping disasters. But what happened in Haiti on January 12, 2010 would forever change the very concept of a crisis map. A devastating earthquake struck the country’s capital that Tuesday afternoon. I was overwhelmed with emotions when I heard the news just an hour later. Over 100,000 people were feared dead. Some very close friends of mine were doing research in Port-au-Prince at the time and I had no idea whether they had survived the earthquake. So I launched a live crisis map of Haiti. But this was an emotional reaction rather than a calculated plan with a detailed strategy. I was in shock and felt the need to do something, anything. It was only after midnight that I finally got an SMS reply from my friends. They had narrowly escaped a collapsing building. But many, many others were not near as lucky. I continued mapping.

Sourcing the Map

The Ushahidi Hait Map in the first 24 hours after the earthquake. Credit: Ushahidi Haiti Project (UHP).

This is what the map looked liked after midnight on January 13th. What was I mapping exactly? Tweets. I had found a dozen Haitians tweeting live from Port-au-Prince shortly after the earthquake. They were describing scenes of devastation but also hope as this tweet shows:

A tweet reporting that a drug store had reopened. Credit: Screenshot from Twitter.

I was using the Ushahidi platform, a free and open source mapping technology from Africa. Think of Ushahidi, which means “witness” in Swahili, as a multi-media inbox connected to a live map. I added these Twitter users to my inbox and began mapping the most urgent Tweets (those that had enough geographic information to be mapped). The following night, several friends joined me in the living room of my dorm to help map Haiti’s needs.

Volunteers to the Rescue

Volunteers at The Fletcher School in a living room at Blakeley Hall. Credit: Carol Waters.

But within a couple days, we couldn’t keep up with the vast amount of information being reported via both social media and mainstream media. So I reached out to friends at The Fletcher School (Tufts University) where I was doing my PhD. By the end of the week, we had trained over 100 graduate and undergraduate students on how to monitor social and mainstream media for relevant, mappable content. These “digital humanitarians” began to manually monitor hundreds and hundreds of online sources for information on Haiti almost 24/7. The Ushahidi Haiti Crisis Map became a live map with some 2,000 individual reports added during the entire project.

Close up of the Haiti Map. Each number represents the individual number of reports within the area. Users could zoom in further to see the individual reports. Credit: Ushahidi Haiti Project (UHP).

Using Satellite Imagery

But mapping this content became more and more challenging because Port-au-Prince was half missing on the the Google Map of Haiti. The city and roads had not been fully mapped by Google Inc. So some colleagues at OpenStreetMap crowdsourced the most detailed roadmap of Haiti ever produced in just a matter of days. They used satellite imagery provided by the World Bank to carefully trace the road network onto an OpenStreetMap of Haiti. In fact, hundreds of volunteers from all around the world collaborated in these efforts. The following video is an animation of this tracing in action. Over 1.4 million edits/traces (flashes of light in the video) were made to the map in just a matter of weeks.

Crowdsourcing via SMS

Just hours after launching the crisis map, we also set up an international SMS number that members of the Haitian Diaspora could text important reports for us to map. The next day, my colleague Josh Nesbit from Medic Mobile started looking for local SMS options to support our Ushahidi Haiti Project:

Credit: Screenshot from Twitter.

Incredibly, someone following his Twitter feed in Cameroon put him in touch with a colleague who was working at Digicel, the largest telecommunications company in Haiti. Within days, we had secured a toll-free SMS number (4636) that allowed anyone in Haiti to text in their most urgent needs and location. This was made possible thanks to multiple groups: Thomson-Reuters Foundation, InSTEDD, US State Department and of course Digicel. In the days that followed, colleagues in Port-au-Prince got the word out about this SMS number by visiting several local community radio stations. They also explained that this was only an information service, not a humanitarian hotline.

Volunteers live mapping the crisis at the Ushahidi Haiti Situation Room in the basement of The Fletcher School. Credit: Ushahidi Haiti Project (UHP).

Translating Needs

Soon enough, we began receiving thousands of text messages. As expected, these SMS’s were written in Haitian Creole rather than English. So my Ushahidi colleague Brian Herbert pulled an all-nighter to customize a web-based interface which was hosted at http://4636.Ushahidi.com [no longer online]. The purpose of this second platform was to enable Haitian-Creole speaking volunteers to translate and geo-locate text messages sent to the SMS number. In effect, the platform was designed to enable the crowdsourced translation and geo-location of incoming text messages specifically for the Ushahidi Haiti Project. Many volunteers from the Haitian Diaspora joined the cause after hearing about the need for volunteers via Facebook.

Some Concerns

During this time, we contacted severals lawyers in Boston to determine whether we could even map these text messages from a privacy standpoint. They opined that we had implicit consent. Two seasoned humanitarian colleagues were also consulted for their feedback. They noted that Haiti was a particularly low risk situation. In other words, the possible harm that could come to local populations was minimal. Do No Harm is a standard principle for anyone operating in a humanitarian crisis or recovery context. The principle is important because it recognizes there is a risk to any intervention. And what is critical in deciding whether a certain course of action is ethical is to consider whether it could potentially cause harm to the local population. Given this feedback, we collectively decided that making the data open in this case was of minimal risk.

Meanwhile, back on the World Wide Web, several hundred volunteers logged on to Ushahidi’s translation platform and reportedly translated some 80,000 10,000 text messages during the first few weeks. Most of these, however, were either not relevant, actionable or mappable. So volunteers at The Fletcher School triaged the translated messages and only mapped the most important life and death messages, i.e., less than 2% of all SMS’s, a very small percentage indeed.

Engaging the Diaspora

Since a number of these SMS’s required more precise geo-location before they could be added to the map, we worked closely with many members of the Haitian Diaspora in Boston who obviously knew their country far better than any of us did. A number of our Haitian friends actually joined us (often for long hours on end) in our make-shift “Situation Room” at The Fletcher School (picture below).

Haitian volunteers crisis mapping Haiti with Sabina Carlson in the Haiti Situation Room at The Fletcher School. Sabina, who speak fluent Creole, was the project's volunteer liaison for the Haitian Diaspora. Credit: Ushahidi.

Operational Response

On January 19th, just a week after the earthquake, someone from the US Coast Guard emailed us with the following question: “I am compiling reports from Haiti for the US Coast Guard and Joint Task Force Command Center. Is there someone I can speak with about how better to use the information in Ushahidi?” Several days later, we set up a dedicate Skype chat with the Coast Guard to fast-forward the most urgent (and actionable) content that was being added to the live Haiti Crisis Map. We were also contacted by an American Search and Rescue team in Port-au-Prince who urgently needed GPS coordinators for the locations of trapped individuals. More on this incredible story here.

On January 22nd, the US Marine Corps got in touch with us via email:

“I am with the US Marine Corps. I am stateside assisting the 22 MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit] coming off the USS Bataan [on the Haitian Coast]. We want to use your data to bring aid to the people Haiti right now. The USMC is focusing on Leogane, Grand Goave, and Petit Goave. Is there a way to import your data into Google Earth or GIS? We want to make this work for the people of Haiti…please let me know ASAP”

Five days later, the same contact from the US Marine Corps shared the following by email (which we got permission to make public):

“I can not overemphasize to you what the work of the Ushahidi/Haiti has provided. It is saving lives every day. I wish I had time to document to you every example, but there are too many and our operation is moving too fast. Here is one from the 22 MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit]: ‘We had data on an area outside of Grand Goave needing help. Today, we sent an assessment team out there to validate their needs and everything checked out. While the team was out there, they found two old women and a young girl with serious injuries from the earthquake; one of the women had critical respiratory issues. They were evacuated.’

Your site saved these people’s lives. I say with confidence that there are 100s of these kind of stories. The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most. We did have a tech barrier that we had to surmount. The Marines downrange have Google Earth and your site does not work on the ship for them. So, I had Georgia Tech create a bridge from your site to Google Earth.

But it is YOUR data and YOUR work that is putting aid and assistance directly on the target and saving lives. Our big gap right now is locating NGOs and where they are working. Your site is helping with that. Keep up the good work!! You are making the biggest difference of anything I have seen out there in the open source world.”

At the end of this 2 month operation in Haiti, the Crisis Map looked like this:

Onwards

These incredible efforts following the Haiti earthquake demonstrated a huge potential for the future of humanitarian response. Student volunteers in Boston working online with the Diaspora using free mapping technology from Africa could help save lives in another country thousands of miles away without ever setting foot in said country. In time, these reactive and organic volunteer-driven efforts in Haiti, and those that followed that same year in Chile, Pakistan and Russia, led to the launch of the award-winning Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a global network of 850+ volunteers in more than 80 countries around the world who use their live mapping skills to support humanitarian, human rights, development and media organizations .

The purpose of the SBTF is to create a network of already trained volunteers so we don’t have to scramble again like in Haiti. SBTF volunteers (or Mapsters as they are called) have since partnered with multiple organizations in dozens of deployments around the world. The SBTF is now also part of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNetwork), a new consortium of volunteer networks who support humanitarian organizations.

For my next blog post in this series on Crisis Mapping, I’ll share an equally remarkable story about the United Nations, Genghis Khan, Satellite Imagery, Somalia and National Geographic. Yes, they’re all connected in an intriguing way. Stay tuned to find out how! And remember, to map the world is to know it. But to map the world live is to change it before it’s too late.

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for positive social change. He currently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier.

]]>http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/02/crisis-mapping-haiti/feed/4351651Back to the Future: On National Geographic and Crisis Mappinghttp://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/19/back-to-the-future-on-national-geographic-and-crisis-mapping/
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/19/back-to-the-future-on-national-geographic-and-crisis-mapping/#commentsTue, 19 Jun 2012 18:01:19 +0000http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/?p=50829Published in October 1888, the first issue of National Geographic Magazine “was a modest looking scientific brochure with an austere terra-cotta cover” (NG 2003). The inaugural publication comprised a dense academic treatise on the classification of geographic forms by genesis. But that wasn’t all. The first issue also included a riveting account of “The Great White Hurricane” of March 1888, which still ranks as one of the worst winter storms ever in US history.
Wreck at Coleman's Station, New York & Harlem R. R., March 13, 1888. Photo courtesy NOAA Photo Library.

I’ve been tagged as the “Crisis Mapper” of the Emerging Explorers Class of 2012. So imagine my astonishment when I began discovering that National Geographic had a long history of covering and mapping natural disasters, humanitarian crises and wars starting from the very first issue of the magazine in 1888. And when World War I broke out:

“Readers opened their August 1914 edition of the magazine to find an up-to-date map of ‘The New Balkan States and Central Europe’ that allowed them to follow the developments of the war. Large maps of the fighting fronts continued to be published throughout the conflict […]” (NG 2003).

Map of ‘The New Balkan States and Central Europe’ from the August 1914 "National Geographic Magazine." Image courtesy NGS.

National Geographic even established a News Service Bureau to provide bulletins on the geographic aspects of the war for the nation’s newspapers. As the respected war strategist Carl von Clausewitz noted half-a-century before the launch of Geographic, “geography and the character of the ground bear a close and ever present relation to warfare, . . . both as to its course and to its planning and exploitation.”

“When World War II came, the Geographic opened its vast files of photographs, more than 300,000 at that time, to the armed forces. By matching prewar aerial photographs against wartime ones, analysts detected camouflage and gathered intelligence” (NG 2003).

During the 1960s, National Geographic “did not shrink from covering the war in Vietnam.” Staff writers and photographers captured all aspects of the war from “Saigon to the Mekong Delta to villages and rice fields.” In the years and decades that followed, Geographic continued to capture unfolding crises, from occupied Palestine and Apartheid South Africa to war-torn Afghanistan and the drought-striven Sahel of Africa.

The iconic cover featuring a young Afghan refugee from June 1985. Photo courtesy NGS.

Geographic also covered the tragedy of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the dramatic eruption of Mount Saint Helens. The gripping account of the latter would in fact become the most popular article in all of National Geographic history.

Today, “new technologies–remote sensing, lasers, computer graphics, x-rays and CT scans–allow National Geographic to picture the world in new ways.” This is equally true of maps. “Since the first map was published in the magazine in 1888, maps have been an integral component of many magazine articles, books and television programs […]. Originally drafted by hand on large projections, today’s maps are created by state-of-the art computers to map everything from the Grand Canyon to the outer reaches of the universe” (NG 2003). And crises.

“Pick up a newspaper and every single day you’ll see how geography plays a dominant role in giving a third dimension to life,” wrote Gil Grosvenor, the former Editor in Chief of National Geographic (NG 2003). And as we know only too well, many of the headlines in today’s newspapers relay stories of crises the world over. National Geographic has a tremendous opportunity to shed a third dimension on emerging crises around the globe using new live mapping technologies. Indeed, to map the world is to know it, and to map the world live is to change it live before it’s too late. The next post in this series will illustrate why with an example from the 2010 Haiti Earthquake.

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for positive social change. He currently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier.